Sunday, April 4, 1993

On Banning Leg-Hold Traps

As
the lobbyist of record for New Jersey's 1984 law banning steel-jaw
leg-hold traps (and against several failed fur trade attempts to
eviscerate the statute), I got from the article the distinct feeling of
entering a time warp. Nearly a decade after the law was passed,
arguments that were fully discredited during legislative deliberations
were being resurrected.

The idea that trapping has been a major
source of income for trappers and their families is, with very few
exceptions, not the case. At the same time the New Jersey Legislature
was considering the ban, the United States Bureau of the Census
estimated that the number of professional trappers and hunters in the
United Stated was "between 0 and 2,000." Very few if any of those
professionals resided in New Jersey, the most densely populated state in
the nation.

The Pennsylvania "Trapper Training Guide" advises
trappers: "Trapping is done primarily for sport, although the extra
dollars gleaned from a year's catch always comes in handy."

According
to the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, which
conducted a nationwide survey of trappers, the average trapper "traps 11
days out of the season." The same survey asked trappers if the activity
was a "major source of income," and 86.4 percent responded, "No."

All of this hardly constitutes the scenario of livelihood deprivation painted by a handful of hard-core trappers in the article.

The
pro-trapping position of the New Jersey Division of Fish, Game and
Wildlife, the major lobbyist against the 1984 law, was mentioned. The
bureaucracy enjoys a conflict of interest about as hard to miss as the
proverbial barn door. The division's budget is dependent on revenues
from hunting and trapping licenses for salaries and benefits.

It
is unfortunate that the salutary humanitarian results of this law -- a
drastic reduction in the number of animals subjected to the
bone-crushing agony of steel-jaw leg-hold traps -- were instead
portrayed as bothersome to the state's 435 trappers.

The law's
sponsors, the former legislators D. Bennett Mazur and Carmen Orechio,
deserve our gratitude for ridding this state of an unspeakably cruel
19th-century device that has been banned by 64 countries, but not, to
this nation's shame, by the United States.